3700X and 3900X Raise the bar

We all waited for this report. Since last December – and especially since CES – AMD has informed us about the new Zen 2 microarchitecture and AMD's latest Ryzen 3000 CPU series. AMD has a significantly improved CPU architecture and has been developed using TSMC's latest generation manufacturing process. At a time when rival Intel has struggled to work at full speed. The net result is that the first and second generation Ryzen CPUs were all about AMD returning to the competition and capturing Intel's notable performance advantage. The Ryzen 3000 series, however, is nothing short of AMD's first attempt in nearly 13 years to measure (or beat). Intel at a separate game on the desktop CPU market. It's a big moment for AMD and an exciting moment for the entire CPU industry.

The new Ryzen 3000 chips mark the first "big" jump for AMD since they introduced their first Ryzen processors just over two years ago. In contrast to last year's Ryzen 2000 series, which was a minor upgrade and brought some improvements to the microarchitecture and process node, this year's Ryzen 3000 is an important upgrade for both the CPU architecture and the manufacturing node. It marks the transition from AMD's 1

2-nm process from GlobalFoundries to TSMC's newest 7-nm node. More exciting, however, is how AMD actually implemented this switch: Ryzen 3000 is not just a single chip, but a collection of uneven chips that first introduced this design paradigm in a consumer product.

Today, AMD, along with the new Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 series, brings the entire new CPU range and platform to market. In terms of CPU coverage, we're going to get the new flagship, the 12-core Ryzen 3900X for $ 499, and the 8-core Ryzen 7 3700X for $ 329 and its ultra-low TDP of 65W more accurate look at.

CPU line-up

AMD Ryzen 3000s CPUs by Matisse

AnandTech

Cores Threads

Base Freq

Boost Freq

L2 Cache

L3 Cache

PCIe 4.0

Chiplets IO + CPU

TDP

Price (SEP)

Ryzen 9 [19659017

16C

32T

3.5

4.7

8 MB

64 MB

16 + 4 + 4

1 + 2

105W [19659008] 9016 [1949Ryzen9

3900X

12C

24T

3.8

4.6 [19659008 6 MB

64 MB

16 + 4 + 4

1 + 2

[10590

499 USD

Ryzen 7

3800X

8C [19659008] 16T

3.9

4.5 [1965900819659008] 32 MB

16 + 4 + 4

1 + 1

105 W

399 USD

Ryzen 7

3700X [19659008] 8C 16T

3.6

4.4

4 MB

32 MB

16 + 4 + 4

1 + 1

65W

$ 329 [Ryzen5[196590173600X

6C

12T

3.8

4.4

3 MB

32 MB

16 + 4 + 4

1 + 1

95W [19659008$

Ryzen 5

3600

6C

12T

3.6

4.2

3 MB

32 MB

19659008] 16 + 4 + 4

1 + 1

65 W

$ 199

AMD today launches five different SKUs, including the 16 -core Ryzen 9 3950X September. For today's launch, AMD tested the R9 3900X and R7 3700X models, and we took them for a ride in the limited time we had with them.

At the top we have the Ryzen 3900X, that is a 12-core design. In fact, it is the first 12-core processor in a standard desktop socket and is quite unique within the AMD product stack, as it is currently the only SKU that fully exploits AMD's latest chiplet architecture. While all other Ryzen parts consist of two chiplets – the base I / O chip and a single CPU chiplet – the 3900X comes with two such CPU chiplets that give it (in part) the extra cores and the 64 MB L3 Grant cache capacity.

Interestingly, AMD has increased the number of cores by 50% over its previous flagship processor, yet managed to keep the TDP at the same 105W as the Ryzen 2700X. In addition, the chip clocks in the boost clock 300 MHz faster than its predecessor and now reaches 4.6 GHz. Even the base clock has been increased by 100 MHz to 3.8 GHz. The big question then is whether the new 7 nm process node and Zen 2 are really that efficient, or whether we have to expect higher performance numbers.

Meanwhile, our second chip of the day is the new Ryzen 3700X, which is configured and positioned as a particularly efficient model. With a 4.4GHz boost clock and a 3.6G base clock, the part should be much faster than the Ryzen 2700X, but AMD has managed to develop a 65W TDP part that has some interesting ones Analyzes will be possible. [19659004FortsetzungderHinrichtung

Today's launch of Zen 2 and Ryzen 3000 is another step forward on the AMD roadmap. The company has been working on a very ambitious development roadmap for its CPU designs, and Zen 2 is the first opportunity for the company to flex and complete the core CPU design.

Implementing this roadmap has been important to AMD both because it helped close the performance gap with Intel and because it helped customers (especially hyperscalers and companies) to prove that Zen is not a coincidence and that the company can continue to reliably improve its technology. This is particularly noteworthy since Intel's rival has not stopped, but Intel's entire desktop technology over the past three years has been based on the same Skylake core architecture and variations on Intel's exceptional 14nm process at the time. This will eventually change as Intel fixes its desktop home for 2020. However, AMD is currently making progress if Intel can not, and AMD can take full advantage of Intel's bad luck and pull customers under its spell.

And of course AMD is not finished here. For the company's engineers, today's chips are the work of the past year, and the company is working on the next-generation Zen 3 core. Zen 3 is still a generation away – and today it's all about Zen 2 – but AMD makes it clear that Zen 2 is not the end of the world and that they are working to further extend their CPU microarchitecture and their entire platform improve .

Great performance improvements, especially for games

The third and Gen Ryzen processors promise some notable performance improvements for users. The Zen 2 core microarchitecture is said to deliver over 10% IPC improvements. This, along with the higher clock rates, should provide some solid generation improvements for many workloads. Especially for games, AMD states that we should see some big improvements – the double size of the L3 cache has supposedly had a remarkable effect on many game titles, with AMD speaking of ~ 20% to even ~ 30% improvements Comparison to the last generation of the Ryzen 2700X.

The Ryzen 3000 Competition: Intel's Coffee Lake Refresh

The positioning of the Ryzen 3000 Series over the Intel product line is both a matter of performance and price. AMD had already made comparisons at Computex between the new SKUs and the Intel counterparts, where we saw comparisons between units with similar prices. Even Intel's expensive Skylake high-end desktop processor (HEDT), the Core i9-9920X, is not wholly out of line with the Ryzen 3900X, according to the company.

Compared to its immediate predecessor, Intel's Coffee Lake Refresh has suffered a significant slump in both clock speeds and core numbers. This allowed Intel to eliminate any advantage of the Ryzen 2000 series in multi-threaded performance, while maintaining a comfortable one-thread performance advantage.

Compared to the Ryzen 3000 series, the Intel series will apparently have no more IPC lead. AMD has not been in such a situation since Athlon 64 days ago and more than 15 years. This is a remarkable twist. But make no mistake: IPC is only one-half the equation for single-threaded performance, and the other is raw-frequency, and the Intel range still has a notable advantage thanks to its peak frequencies of up to 5GHz. The acquisition of Intel's single-threaded performance advantage (at least on a consistent basis) is a big order for the Ryzen 3000 series.

Compare: Ryzen 9 3900X vs Core i9-9900K

AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

Features

Intel Core i9-9900K

12/24

Kernels / Threads

8/16

3.8 / 4.6 GHz

Base / Turbo

3.6 / 5.0 GHz

16 (Free) + 4 (NVMe)

PCIe 4.0 Lanes

16 (Free) Gen 3.0 (No Gen 4.0)

512 KB / Core

L2 cache

256 KB / core

4x 16 MB 64 MB total

L3 Cache

16 MB

105 W

TDP

95 W

499 USD

Price (List)

484 US Dollars

If you look Looking at chip pricing and positioning, the big battle between the desktop processors is between the Ryzen 3900X at $ 484 and the i9-9900K at $ 484. Both are by chance the high-end SKUs of their respective mainstream desktop computing platforms.

Here AMD should have a clear advantage over the multithreaded performance of the new Ryzen 9-series, as it can use 50%. more cores than Intel, though it is promised to stay in a similar TDP range of 105W vs. 95W. We still expect the 9900K to gain some workloads that are under-utilized due to Intel's clock speed advantage. However, we will examine this in more detail in the upcoming benchmark analysis.

Compare: Ryzen 7 3700X vs Core i7 -9700K

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X

Features

Intel Core i7-9700K

8/16

Cores / Threads

8/8

3.6 4.4 GHz

Base / Turbo

3.6 / 4.9 GHz

16 (free) + 4 (NVMe)

PCIe 4.0 lanes

16 (free) Gen 3.0 (no Gen 4.0)

512 KB / kernel

L2 cache

256 KB / kernel

2x 16 MB 32 MB total [19659027] L3 cache

12 MB

65 W

TDP

95 W

$ 329

Price (List)

$ 385

The Ryzen 7 3700X is a interesting SKU. With only one populated CPU chip, the device has more than half of the available L3 cache compared to the Ryzen 9 3900X. But all CPU cores are also active in one chip. Theoretically, this means that there is less overall L3 cache available to the CPU cores because they need to share it with an additional core in their respective CCXs.

With a 3.6 GHz / 4.4 GHz base / boost clock configuration, expect the 3700X to outperform the previous generation 2700X in all scenarios. The price competition is the Core i7-9700K. Intel should again have a performance advantage with a thread thanks to its 500 MHz higher clock rate – but we'll have to see how both chips adapt to daily usage.

The Zen 2 μarch Review: Read Our Special Article

We have already reviewed the microarchitecture and analysis of the Zen 2 microarchitecture after our June Tech Day briefing. Read the article to prepare further test analyzes in our review today: